“Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name,” says the Jewish mourner’s kaddish. This declaration, a sign of one’s having made peace with the death for which he is grieving, may appear indifferent to the authentic emotional state of the mourner. But Jewish mourning customs do not demand more of the bereaved than what his emotional state can withstand. As we saw earlier, they allow—indeed, they require—the bereaved to remove himself temporarily from life and from responsibility. Gradually, however, these customs work to re-introduce the mourner into society. They prove that a return to normal life is possible and is in fact an important accomplishment for the individual and his community as a whole.

Of course, the biblical narrator knows that sometimes a mourner will refuse to recover. About Jacob, for instance, he writes, “And [he] mourned for his son many days. And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said: ‘For I will go down to my son mourning into Sheol.’ Thus his father wept for him.”²⁸ The statement “but he refused” signifies that Jacob had a choice whether to be comforted or not. Jacob, wracked with grief, feels that he wants to die along with Joseph in order to continue being with him. This is a natural urge for one who has not yet buried his dead, and all the more so when the dead is one’s own son. Yet the Bible’s choice of words, “but he refused,” seems to me an intimate criticism of Jacob. King David’s love for his son was no less than Jacob’s love for Joseph. Indeed, when David’s son falls critically ill, David also loses his will to live.²⁹ David’s servants are therefore afraid to inform him of his son’s death for fear of his reaction. Astonishingly, however, David rises from his mourning, bathes, clothes himself, and requests to eat. He consoles his wife Bathsheba and has relations with her, and thus Solomon is conceived. It seems to me that the Bible commends a response of this kind from the bereaved. It also appears to be commending the support and sympathy provided by his advisers and drawing an implicit connection between it and David’s own recovery. For recovery, the Bible makes clear, is preferable. And indeed, when the bereaved avail themselves of the kinds of mourning customs found in Judaism, which are designed to ease the individual back into normal life, recovery is not only preferable, but possible. 

I remember my astonishment upon first reading Leib Rochman’s book Un in Dayn Blut Zolstu Lebn (“In Your Blood Thou Shalt Live”).³⁰ I discovered that someone could recount his recent experiences in the Holocaust from an often humorous perspective. I consider this work a monumental achievement, one that almost defies belief. Since then, I have discovered a similar capacity to recount one’s experience of the Holocaust in a humorous, even lively mode in Sabina Schweid’s War, O War, What a Lady Art Thou, written many years after the events took place.³¹ I value these books not because they are more educational than other Holocaust memoirs, but because I find them to be more true. Their representation of the psychological state of Holocaust survivors strikes me as more honest and more sincere: It is a state of struggling to recover and to build a new life. Indeed, the experience of struggling to recover from trauma seems to me a no less compelling adventure, and no less deserving of literary stylization and media coverage, than the condition of being trapped forever in a post-traumatic state. I admire these authors and their books and feel grateful to them. In my eyes, it is they who are truly continuing the Jewish tradition, and as such they are the most fitting builders of a strong and genuine Jewish-Israeli culture.

For this reason, I find it difficult to read about the Holocaust from a perspective that aggrandizes the mythic magnitude of its horrors, its perpetrators, and its victims. From the novels written by Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors, it is possible to learn the extent to which people’s reactions to trauma differed. We may also learn that man retains a certain degree of moral freedom and responsibility in every situation, even the most amoral ones. It is easy to be forgiving of immorality in conditions of trauma and the struggle for survival. But how long afterward do survivors retain their moral exemption? And how long the Jewish people? Or the State of Israel?

As long as Israeli education was overtly anti-diasporic, it was also opposed to a self-perception of victimhood. We were taught not to be victims of fate, but rather to fight for our lives and our right to happiness. The State of Israel is home to many refugees, each carrying his own experiences of grief and loss, each struggling to recover in his own way. We should be proud of this fact. We should promote it. We should assist ourselves and those around us in the ongoing struggle to recover to the best of our ability. 
 

 

 

1. Yehudit Hendel, They Are Different People (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1950) [Hebrew].

2. Deuteronomy 14:1-2.

3. Yair Lorberbaum, Image of God: Halacha and Agada (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2004) [Hebrew].

4. II Samuel 19:6-8.

5. II Samuel 12:22-23.

6. Zelda, “Be Not Far,” in The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems, trans. Marcia Falk (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2002), p. 107.

7. Moed Katan 8a. This custom is mentioned in many later sources as well. See, for example, Shulhan Aruch, Yoreh De’a 403.

8. Moed Katan 21b.

9. The Jewish custom of placing stones on a grave was originally intended to prevent the desecration of the dead body during times when it was not always possible to erect tombstones.

10. Moed Katan 27a.

11. A modern outlook will probably see these religious laws as flawed, because they make relatively little mention of women and completely ignore children. To be sure, the supportive and consoling social framework is exclusively male. Women—and more so, girls and boys under the ages of twelve and thirteen, respectively—do not receive comparable attention from halacha and custom, despite the fact that they are more vulnerable and less capable of recovery.

12. Psalms 137:8-9.

13. Proverbs 24:17.

14. In Avraham Shlonsky, Distress (Tel Aviv: Hedim, 1924) [Hebrew].

15. Yitzhak Lamdan, Masada (Tel Aviv: Hedim, 1927) [Hebrew].

16. Natan Alterman, Joy of the Poor (Tel Aviv: Mahbarot Lesifrut, 1941)
[Hebrew]; Natan Alterman, “The Silver Platter,” in The Silver Platter: Collected Poems (Ministry of Defense, 1974), pp. 314-315 [Hebrew]. An English translation can be found at www.phy6.org/outreach/poems/alterman.htm. It should be noted that Haim Nahman Bialik rejected this myth, claiming it was contrary to the Jewish world outlook.

17. Shaul Tchernichowsky, “Behold, Oh Earth...,” trans. Yosef Wilford, in Ben M. Edidin, ed., Selected Poems of Shaul Tchernichowsky (New York: Jewish Education Committee of New York, 1944), p. 13.

18. Natan Alterman, “Morning Song,” in Alterman, Ditties and Songs, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1979), pp. 302-303 [Hebrew].

19. See Vered Levi-Barzilai, “Accusation: Cruel Experimentation on Thousands of Children” Haaretz weekend supplement, December 29, 2000 [Hebrew].

20. Yehudit Hendel, The Mountain of Losses (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1991) [Hebrew].

21. Zelda, “My Peace,” in Spectacular Difference, p. 63.

22. Amos Oz, Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories, trans. Nicholas de Lange and Philip Simpson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).

23. A.B. Yehoshua, For Normality (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1980) [Hebrew].

24. This is also the subject of his short story “The Yatir Evening Express,”  trans. Marsha Pomerantz, in A.B. Yehoshua, The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Stories of A.B. Yehoshua (London: Peter Halban, 1988), pp. 141-162.

25. Genesis 3:9.

26. Genesis 4:7.

27. God, on the other hand, does not repay Cain in kind, and allows him the opportunity for rehabilitation. This illustrates the difference between the divine and human responses to trauma.

28. Genesis 37:34-35.

29. II Samuel 12:17-18.

30. Leib Rochman, In Your Blood Thou Shalt Live, trans. Hanoch Kalai
(Jerusalem: Yesodot, 1961) [Hebrew].

31. Sabina Schweid, War, O War, What a Lady Art Thou: Childhood and Youth During the Holocaust in Zborow (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003) [Hebrew].